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July 2015 • SMT Magazine 55 INDuSTRy 4.0: WHO BENEFITS? continues the essentiAl Pioneer's survivAl Guide Michael Ford is senior marketing development manager with Mentor graphics corporation valor division. To read past columns, or to contact the author, click here. leads inevitably to questions about the viability of on-shoring or re-shoring. This has now gone right around to solve the issue that the German government was look- ing for, but perhaps in a different way than was originally intended by some. Computerization is not simply automation to further eliminate the costs labor; the automation of automation brings opportunity for surgically precise man- agement and control of the whole business. In- dustry 4.0 will therefore not fade away, or sim- ply become an engineering anecdote. The mo- tive, incentive, and opportunity are now being pushed from the top down. The challenge goes out then to production managers and engi- neers, to find out not only how technically the principles of Industry 4.0 can be implemented, but what effect this will have on people and their processes, within manufacturing and be- yond, and perhaps most importantly to many, on their careers. Top-down decisions are much harder to satisfy than you might imagine be- cause the details of applying solutions involves people throughout the entire operation, result- ing in significant issues. As we have seen in earlier columns, in the SMT world, some great benefits can be achieved, but an almost equal number of fundamental changes need to be accepted for Industry 4.0 to work. Successful application of Industry 4.0 principles, including the associated "industrial Internet of things," "big data," etc., needs to be spelled out for everyone in key positions to un- derstand how it affects them, that is, what is the benefit to them. Next time, we start to look into the points of view of these specific people to see how these principles applied could change their lives for the better. SMT figure 1: filling soda cans in a factory that can recognize each can by an rf-iD tag and automatically create the exact sodas required is an example of the flexibility provided by industry 4.0 to respond to short-term random customer demand.